


One part ambition, two parts cocaine

by pushdragon



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Inception Reverse Big Bang Challenge, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:41:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3128252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a reclusive tech genius and the liberty of the free world is at stake, but the important bit is that Arthur goes undercover as a supermodel. (Inspired by <a href="http://shiroi-ten.livejournal.com/25590.html">this lovely art</a> by shiroi_ten.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	One part ambition, two parts cocaine

**Author's Note:**

> FIRST, check out the original art by shiroi_ten [here](http://shiroi-ten.livejournal.com/25590.html) and leave it all the love it deserves - it's seriously cute, and seriously irresistible as a prompt! 
> 
> This is a very late, unofficial contribution to Inception Reverse Bang. After I'd completed my official entry, shiroi_ten's illustration of Arthur as a pouty model got a grip on my imagination and refused to let go. 
> 
> One of Arthur's outfits in the fic is from shiroi_ten's art prompt. The others are inspired by actual high fashion - follow the links at your peril! (The link to the black suit is prone to redirect - so I put another copy [here](http://pushdragon.livejournal.com/142146.html)).
> 
> Also, the prompt is from Zoolander, which I've never seen, so that will explain the almost total lack of resemblance to Ben Stiller, which all in all I think is a blessing.

Sometime after eleven thirty, the stream of beautiful people started to thin out a bit. In the absence of their glitter and laughter, the neighbourhood revealed its true colours. It could have been any low-rent industrial backstreet, unbroken brick facades, roll-down loading bay doors, a few half-hearted white graffiti tags. The bass of three dozen speakers throbbed through the wall behind Eames, and up through his feet. 

He unfolded his arms from the this-means-business stance he’d worn most of the night, and pulled off his cap to smooth back his hair. 

"Hold up," said Mac on the other side of the door. "You got a quarter hour left on the clock."

"Don’t I know it," Eames scowled, like any sulky minimum-wage worker with his eye on the second hand, rather than a seasoned grifter patiently waiting for a chance to slink inside to where his mark was waiting, unaware. "Can I have a smoke?"

"Sure you can," Mac told him, idly clenching his fist in order to observe, with some satisfaction, the play of muscle down his forearm. "In a quarter hour."

Eames shrugged his leather jacket over his black t-shirt and slipped his phone out of the pocket. The last fifteen minutes were going to be the longest. Mac nodded through a woman in a white dress with a neckline practically down to her Brazilian, and a man with square glasses and an extravagant black beard. The transaction took place with barely a flicker of eye contact, as if the world of fashion and the world of security did not speak the same language.

A couple of taps on the screen brought up his WishFix account – or at least the trial account he’d opened in the name of Basil Kyriou, an old target with an attractive habit of repeating the same password over practically every service. Eames had only opened the account two days ago, and already it had clocked up eight hundred dollars worth of purchases. 

In his peripheral vision, a long white car slunk along the curb and stopped. 

Swiping the "history" tab, he laughed when he saw what Joshua Renke’s famous algorithm had selected for Mr Kyriou. A pair of Zegna loafers that must have accounted for about three quarters of the charges, and a string of porn films. WishFix was a mirror that told no lies. Somewhere in his browsing history, or his email content, or within view of his webcam, the staid defence attorney had evidently revealed a fondness for Japanese women in school uniforms. WishFix and American Express had answered his unspoken prayers. 

A solid wall of hammering electronic beats flooded out as the limo’s doors opened. He glanced up long enough to see four giraffe-legged women teeter out, shivering in little wisps of cutting edge fashion that had to be glued over the few pieces of anatomy they didn’t yet care to share with the world. A few curious flashes went off. Behind them came a group of equally slender men wearing sunglasses, fur and a palpable air of importance. The flashes became a storm.

In a moment of good-hearted mischief, Eames pulled up the account of the security guard whose tag he was wearing, who was currently in a city police station trying to explain how his cell phone had come to be found at the scene of a failed break-and-enter on a jewellery store. A tap and a swipe sent him $500 of gift credit, courtesy of Mr Kyriou. Purchases popped up immediately. Jay Z tickets. A pair of trainers. A set of weights. Straightforward. Eames liked that. 

He was checking his watch when the latest guests approached, and almost missed it. The night might have gone very differently, except for a sudden gust of wind that curled up under his trouser legs. 

A six-foot red-head, trying to keep her hemline south of indecent exposure while balancing on heels about the width and length of chopsticks, missed the second step, and her jewelled clutch bag went sailing into the air. A silver-nailed hand lunged out to grab it, while its owner steadied her with his shoulder. 

Senses pricking up, Eames’s gaze travelled up tailored tan leather boots with gold stitching along the rear seam, then a set of leopard print trousers that would have to be peeled off like a sausage skin, and a fur jacket whose extravagant bulk covered remarkably little.

He’d know that boyish profile and critical jaw anywhere. Behind the dark glasses, Arthur gave no sign of recognition as he continued up the stairs, holding onto his unsteady colleague and laughing.

At last, the job had got interesting.

**

From the mezzanine that ran around the edge of the warehouse, Eames watched. An intimate crowd of two to three hundred spilled over the booths and tables and bright retro lounges, leaning in flirtatiously to make themselves heard over the thundering bass. Acres of bare skin, glitter like a snowfall over everything, and the occasional manager or journalist looked like stunted intruders next to the preternaturally long-limbed talent. 

He scanned the crowd for his mark. The reclusive Renke rarely strayed from a well-trodden path between his home in Atlanta and corporate HQ in California, travelling by private plane from his own airfield. He shunned political invitations and openly scorned the "Harvard production line geniuses" of his own industry. But like anyone who’d endured the solitude of growing up geek in a town where the accepted scale of manhood ranged from quarterback to shortstop, he was bound to be susceptible to the flattery of being sought after. And it had been worth a shot that a young man who’d worn Armani to the senate committee hearing on subversion of privacy might shelter a secret yearning to be part of the fashion set. 

Renke was leaning back on an orange sofa, holding a square tumbler like a man accustomed to the more comfortable fit of a bottle. Next to him sat Arthur, in a long-legged sprawl that subtly curled in towards his target. If anyone could extract the closely guarded WishFix algorithm by the sheer, smouldering force of attention, Arthur looked like the man to do it. The two of them formed the centre of a cluster of nearby conversations. 

Eames might have missed him, if he hadn’t caught him side-on before. From the front, the heavy smudge of make-up made his brow look dark and menacing, and some sort of bronze blush put more severe angles in his cheeks. At a second glance, his [jacket](http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/autumn-winter-2013/mens/versace/full-length-photos/gallery/900921) looked like something skinned off the offspring of a Persian cat and an angry mountain bear, if it had any natural origins at all. His bare chest gleamed with a liberal scattering of glitter. It was the sort of safe, exaggerated look that his twelve year old self might have folded into his stack of GQs for night-time inspiration. He spent a couple of minutes appreciating it. 

"Who’s that then?" Eames asked, sidling up to one of the other loners on the mezzanine – a girl with little trail of daisies tattooed down the nape of her neck and a brown dress that needed Beyonce’s star wattage to make it sparkle. "He’s new, isn’t he?"

She looked at him like he’d rolled up to the McDonald’s drive-through and ordered a platter of fresh oysters. 

"Yeah," she scoffed. "New like a century ago. He had a thing with Heath Ledger, that’s literally how far back he goes. There were pictures all over Twitter last week."

She added something about two of the Karsashians that he found hard to hear and harder to believe. 

"All right. So why haven’t I seen him before?"

"Rehab," she shrugged, as if that was enough to explain away a history that was bound to be ninety-nine percent mystery and one percent carefully fabricated internet backstory. "In and out since he was sixteen. Pills, powder, needles, diet – you name it, he’s literally fucked himself up with it. That’s where he met Lindsay, they were practically engaged before his last breakdown."

Down below, the object of her speculation picked up a scotch bottle to add a trickle to his own glass and a liberal glug to his companion’s. Arthur turned and grinned as a silver-clad Amazon leaned over the back of the sofa to plant a kiss on his cheek. Renke’s low profile and recently grown goatee seemed to be doing their work because no-one was giving the billion-dollar tech mogul a second glance.

"He was huge, before the arrest in Paris. Huge like massive." Her eyes remained glued to Arthur’s sparkly figure. "Top of every guest list, but he only does like two or three shoots every year. He said that Gaultier can literally suck his dick before he’ll wear his shitty clothes again."

"Goodness," Eames said. "Imagine being a complete and total arsehole."

"Yeah," she agreed dreamily, then frowned. "Who’s the ugly guy next to him? Is he some kind of designer?"

"You don’t know him?" Eames enquired.

He made up a pretty little story about how Joshua Renke was basically a good Samaritan who, when the right mood took him, would happily hand out the code to a master account that sent out six months’ worth of free WishFix deliveries. A few moments later, she was gone. 

He tracked her progress with amusement. Renke’s back went stiff as she handed him a martini glass. Arthur’s face grew darker while she spoke. He sat up, pulling his ridiculous beast of a jacket over one bared shoulder, and began to scan the room. His scrutiny flitted over Eames, leaning on the balustrade with a beer, then backtracked and locked on him. The irritation in his glare tingled pleasantly over a twenty metre distance. Eames raised his glass and, with a complimentary nod to the outlandish costume, disappeared into the crowd.

Since his own plan to get close to Renke had been sabotaged for tonight, he might experiment with piggybacking off Arthur’s work instead. On the way out, he lifted the floor manager’s tablet and mailed himself a copy of the guest list. It gave him a hotel, a publicist’s phone number, and a name.

Zarthur. 

It sounded like the sort of pill you might take at the washed out end of a brutal party, and wake up afterwards thinking you could speak Russian or channel a god.

**

It turned out that Zarthur’s publicist had one of those deep, drawling New York accents that sat right on the ambitious upper edge of Eames’s vocal range. It took him twenty minutes to find out the location of the shoot, cancel the photographer, and confirm that a last-minute special guest had been invited to watch. 

It was hard to say which of them was more surprised when Eames slunk in the door of the tumbledown old bus depot with a hastily borrowed Leica around his neck. Arthur’s expression was more bad-tempered resignation than genuine shock. Whereas Eames was momentarily robbed of the power of speech.

Arthur was wearing the most thoroughly indecent [suit](http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/autumn-winter-2013/mens/versace/full-length-photos/gallery/900931) Eames had ever set eyes on. 

There was a pair of what might loosely be described as shorts, made out of draping black lace that sketched a beguiling layer of whorls and tendrils on top of the naturally alluring curves of Arthur’s lower half. Apart from a tactful opacity over the codpiece section, it was pretty much as transparent as his wildest imagination could have wished for. A top in matching fabric tightly embraced every last contour of his chest. The fitted black jacket over the top only served to highlight the blatant eroticism of what lay beneath.

"You’re late." 

That was exactly the same voice Arthur used in the first couple of meetings with a new team, when he wanted to stamp his authority on a job from the outset. 

"And if you’re not set up by the time my coffee’s brewed, you’ll be dealing with my lawyers."

And that’s when Eames understood. Zarthur wasn’t a persona at all. He was all of Arthur’s most wilful traits let off their leash and allowed to roam free. He was a mean model. To carve himself a niche in an industry that ran on hissy fits and simmering grudges, he must have learned how to throw the sort of tantrum that left the walls vibrating. Eames kind of wanted to see it. 

"Ready in a jiff," he grinned, hamming it up and mildly disappointed that he hadn’t worn that shirt with actual pineapples on it. "Nothing gets me going like being threatened by a man in a negligée."

He nodded pleasantly to the crowd of support crew working off trestle tables outside the old ticket office. Spotting Renke among them, incognito in a hoodie and jeans, he added, "Tea thanks, love. Half a sugar and a teaspoon of milk – no more, no less." 

Then he fiddled aimlessly with the lights until Arthur’s coffee cup was drained and the toe of his black boot tapped impatiently. 

The bus stop was an atmospheric venue – he committed it to memory as the sort of timeless, rootless backdrop that might be good for an extraction one day. He picked a spot where the metal frame of a long-gone sign now hung in rusty disarray, the ground beneath carpeted in shattered glass and blown-in leaves. Every bit as decayed as Arthur looked neat.

"Just here, kitten." He pointed. "Hang on, love. Save some of that smoulder for the camera, won’t you?" 

Arthur took his place, looking no less murderous. 

"Come here," he ordered. "Let me look at that."

Eames was happy to get closer. "This old thing? This was my first camera, as a matter--" 

The moment he came within reach, Arthur snatched it out of his hands. 

"Who are you working for?" Arthur asked, dropping his voice as he fondled the seven thousand dollar piece of equipment in a vaguely threatening manner. Eames had barely grasped how to turn it on and focus. The swift confidence of Arthur’s fingers said that it had a self-destruct button, and he knew where to find it. "Government or civilian?"

"You first," Eames murmured back at him. "Your old friends at the CIA, is it?"

"This really is top of the range," Arthur mused louder, turning the camera over and balancing it precariously in the palm of his hand as he added sotto voce, "Are you on the NSA team? Yes or no?"

"Arthur," Eames said, offended.

"All right, who?"

"Private interests. Civilian. Now give me that."

This time Arthur let him take the camera back and pet its lens soothingly.

"Well?" he demanded. "Your turn for disclosure."

But Arthur shrugged his jacket off instead, and strode off to strike a pose that involved leaning back against a steel pillar, side-on so that the obligingly thin lace revealed every last intimate contour of his torso in silhouette. He said, "I have an appointment with my manicurist in twenty minutes. If you make me late, you won’t find work in this town again."

Eames swallowed hard. After a few moments, he mustered the brainpower to point the camera, press the shoot button, get a grip on himself, turn the camera on, refocus it, and finally start to take some pictures. 

He doubted that Arthur’s smirk was solely for the camera. 

If he covered every angle from left to right, that was only partly to play the role convincingly. It was easy to get carried away, zooming in on a swirl where the weave of the lace was thinnest, revealing pale, exposed flesh underneath. He found himself fixated, trying to peer through the fabric under Arthur’s navel, wondering whether he was waxed clean down there or had left a trail of hair as a beguiling contrast to the androgynous smoothness he wore everywhere else. Eames imagined himself down on his knees, his mouth warm and wet as he tasted Arthur’s skin through the lace, across his slender chest and down the firm lines of his parted thighs.

"Run out of ideas already?" Arthur’s cool voice made him realise that has hadn’t taken a picture for almost a minute. He was leaning back smugly on the disintegrating bench seat with the jacket discarded completely. The fine layer of lace looked impossibly soft over the straight planes of his chest. His glossy calves looked smooth enough to run his tongue up. 

"Just a sec," he said brightly. "Here."

He proceeded to adjust Arthur’s pose, by means of a coaxing touch under his chin that turned into a slightly presumptuous slide over his neck and shoulder, and then shifted under the neck of his top in a full-blown grope, just out of view of the crowd behind him. Arthur’s teeth gave an angry click and he snapped his legs tightly together. 

"Anytime you’d like to fill me in on who’s running your job," Eames told him solicitously, knuckles brushing over a responsive nipple through the lace, "we can put this charade to an end."

The glare Arthur turned on him was blazing.

Of course it was. Eames had turned him down once, a few jobs ago. It was what guaranteed him a sure-fire response to the merest hint of teasing or flirtation. The embarrassment of having asked and been knocked back. 

It hadn’t been about sex, by the way, that rejection. Arthur had just spent the entire job shooting down every single one of Eames’s ideas, in favour of a plan so literal and direct that it could have been designed by a computer program. A safe plan, a textbook plan, and – more galling still – a plan that had worked perfectly on the first try and brought the job to an end four days early. So of course Eames had turned him down, because it was unhealthy for a man to have everything fall into his lap, and "safe" was just not the sort of character trait that got Eames’s mouth wet. 

And yet here was "safe" Arthur, going undercover in the unsleeping searchlight of celebrity, and currently wearing the most theoretical scrap of lace imaginable.

The pain registered before he’d even noticed the movement. Arthur had grabbed his middle finger and twisted through a full 270 degrees until his arm reached the absolute limit of its tolerance.

"If you think I’ve worked a month in this business without learning how to put a permanent end to wandering hands, you are tragically mistaken, Mr Eames. The next finger that touches me will be torn out of its joint."

It took Eames a few attempts to get air back into his lungs. Then he sought safety in their audience. 

"Lovely," he said. "Now that we understand one another, how about you pop your jacket back on and hop up on the counter here. That’s it, sweetheart."

The ticket counter made a backdrop of peeling paint and dictatorial signage in retro lettering. No liquor. No animals. No indecent language. Arthur pushed himself up onto it and planted his glossy boots apart like a conqueror.

"Like this?"

From down on the ground, his legs seemed to go on forever. But Eames made an uncertain sound. "More casual." Arthur slumped his shoulders a fraction. "No, not like that. A fifties sort of casual. Think of a baseball jacket." Arthur scowled but slouched some more. "More threatening. Give me some attitude. No, not that way. With a hint of a smile. Use your back more."

"Make up your fucking mind," Arthur broke out in a growl.

"Settle down, kitten. Here. Let me show you."

And a moment later, he was standing on the counter at Arthur’s rear, palm sliding up the outside of one exquisitely well-tended thigh, over the delicious contours of his hip-bone and stomach, to spread out across his lower ribs. Apart from the jacket, there was nothing to screen any acts of violence Arthur might try to mete out. 

He felt the very controlled breath that Arthur drew and released.

"Whatever you’re getting out of this," Arthur turned to say over his shoulder, low, "I hope it’s worth six months on crutches when I catch up with you."

"Name of your client," Eames murmured pleasantly. "That’s all I need to know."

Arthur shrugged him off angrily. "We’re done. This guy’s a joke. Catelyn, get his details and make sure he’s never on the same continent as me again. Simon, I want another coffee and a fresh toothbrush."

But as he went to jump down off the counter, his boot skidded on a worn patch of wood and he pitched backwards. Before he could think, Eames caught him, one arm around his middle and the other clenched in the jacket shoulder. His shoulder-blades were bony where they pressed into Eames’s chest as he strained away from the edge. He smelled expensive. The lobe of his ear was almost close enough to bite. 

"Oh," Arthur said.

Eames’s mind helplessly flooded with how good Arthur felt in his arms, all that deadly capability packed into an agile, light weight. He had a vivid premonition of how perfect Arthur would be up against the wall, with those steely arms and legs wrapped around him. Gingerly, they straightened up. Arthur turned to face him, doing nothing to break out of the circle of his arms. There was a glimpse of something vulnerable and shaken, before got himself together. 

"Your first idea was right."

"What?" Eames said dumbly, because his mind was still submerged in that vision of Arthur wrapped around him like a hungry vine, and processing a second idea was out of the question.

"CIA."

"Ah. I see. I knew you’d go back there, in the end."

There was a tightening in Arthur’s face. "Yeah, well. They made it clear that turning them down was not a healthy option."

On the floor below them, a man with a quiff opened three different toothbrush boxes and a fresh tube of toothpaste, and offered the selection to Arthur, who took what he needed and waved him away.

"So cool it," Arthur said. "Because as far as I’m concerned, there’s room for two teams on this job."

A moment later, two bodyguards were helping him down. Eames sat on the counter and wondered what Arthur’s former employers had held over him to make him do their bidding.

"Here’s that tea." Renke appeared to hand over a cardboard cup. 

"Cheers." 

The incognito tech mogul lingered uncertainly, drawing back from the room full of extravagant coifs, mannered chatter and full sleeve floral tattoos.

"If the stories are accurate, he's a nightmare to work for. Is it true that he has bed sheets washed in French champagne every morning?"

Renke’s face screwed up, and he started to fidget with something in his pocket. "Who cares?"

Eames put his tea down on the counter, waited.

"All that stuff's just for kicks. He’s a good listener. Smart." Noble attributes, Eames thought, for an information thief. "He likes to talk about more than just clothes."

Eames was waiting for Renke to expand on what that "more than" might be when a woman in a deceptively demure looking white dress approached. 

"You’ll have to excuse us," she said with a firm grip on Renke’s arm, drawing him away. "Zarthur would like a word." 

Left alone, Eames stayed where he was for a while, observing the orderly work of the dozen-strong team it took to create and maintain the sought-after product of Zarthur.

He sipped the tea. It met his specifications to perfection.

**

That evening, he put together a heavily edited version of the day’s events for his employer, together with a lazy apology for the team meeting that would have directed too many questions his way. He spent an unsatisfying hour watching music videos until they devolved into a kaleidoscope of gold-clad bosoms, twerking bottoms and subliminal snatches of permanently inflamed desire. 

He was deep in a dream when the knock on his door jerked him awake. He had to wipe his lips to dispel the tingling sensation of lace.

Out in the corridor, Arthur was shifting from foot to foot restlessly. He had on a clinging pair of dark blue jeans, a light dusting of glitter, and an unzipped [gold hoodie](http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/autumn-winter-2014/mens/vivienne-westwood/full-length-photos/gallery/1092387) that showed off the expert touch of whoever took care of his waxing. Inside the thick border of kohl and metallic colour, his eyes were flickering, unfocussed.

"What’s wrong?" Eames asked flatly.

"Can I come in?"

"Certainly. Once you tell me what’s going on."

Arthur’s attention flicked up in thought. Whatever was in his system over-rode his usual grumpy poker face. He burst out laughing. "Shitty chemists, Eames." He stumbled forward and Eames stepped aside to let him in. "Shitty, shitty, shitty chemists." 

He was pacing around the kitchen area of the suite, picking up sachets of coffee and tea and discarding them back onto the bench.

"Seriously, these pills change hands for fifty dollars each and they don’t even bother to get the mix consistent. Who does that? Eames? Who works like that? The wine is appellation controllée, the oysters are fresh off the dock, but then they chase it down with a tablet that could be made out of laundry powder. Lazy chemists are the worst, Eames, the worst. Never again. From now on, nothing goes in my mouth unless it comes from a certified professional. I need to stay here for a while. You have a sofa, right? That one there. I’m not asking to sleep in your bed. Not after that --"

He lurched to a halt and put his hand over his face. "Fuck," he said hoarsely. "I am so bad at being high."

Eames filled a teacup with water and held it out. "Drink this."

He took Eames’s wrist instead, making the water slosh. "Chemistry is so beautiful. Why would you waste it on turning your brain into a sponge? I don’t get it."

There was a sheen on his chest, as if he’d been dancing, but his touch was cool.

"Zip up your jacket. Then drink."

He waited until Arthur complied, and refilled the cup for him. 

"Don’t you have a base to go back to? Where’s your team?"

"Them? They’re all agency, hand-picked. Up and coming, you know. They could be running their own department in a couple of years. They have long memories. That’s how you make it in the agency. You store up every little piece of information because one day, one day you might be able to use it to get someone to do what you want. You can’t give them a goddamn inch, Eames. Not an inch."

He turned back to his cup and drank it down. "So no, I’m not going back to my team. I’m going to sleep on your sofa, and I’m not going to talk to you about the job. Or – anything. All right?"

Eames shrugged and went to fetch a spare pillow and blanket from the bedroom cupboard. 

When he came back, Arthur was sitting on the sofa, thumb typing speedily into his phone. On-screen was Zarthur’s Twitter feed. 

"Are you sure you should be doing that right now?"

Arthur laughed. 

"It’s only Twitter," he said, scrolling through Instagram to add a picture of himself in the gold hoodie cheek-to-cheek with Rihanna. "No-one cares if you’re off your face. The worse stuff you say, the better. That one where I said the guy from One Direction got his hair permed at Supercuts – it got over a hundred thousand re-tweets. One hundred thousand—" He triumphantly hit the post button. "—two hundred and eighty seven."

He leaned forward for the remote control and flicked the television on, without bothering to check what it was showing, and went back to a photo of himself looking fierce and pouty next to Selena Gomez.

Eames lingered for a while in the doorway. He knew Arthur’s single-minded focus from the workplace. Here, transposed onto the ephemeral glitter of Zarthur’s world, it took on an intriguing new slant. 

"Hey Eames," Arthur said without looking up from his seat. "Can you not watch me? It’s freaking me out because, you know. Chemical impaired critical faculties." He toed off his shoes and put his bare feet on the coffee table. "Go to bed."

Lucky for him, Eames’s sluggish system had been pulling him in that direction anyway.

**

He was out cold on the sofa when Eames got up in the morning. Jacket unzipped again, and the hood obscuring most of his face. The clear light from the window highlighted the uncushioned stretch of skin over his lower ribs. Eames dislodged the phone from his hand and put it on the table.

Eames had got half way through his breakfast and newspaper when his guest sat up with a start. His attention jerked around the room like he expected to find a gun trained on him.

Calmer, he trudged over to the sink to put the kettle on. Eames spent a moment appreciating the natural sprawl of his feet beneath the precisely tailored hem of his jeans.

"So," Arthur said once he had a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. "Wikileaks, is it?"

Eames leaned back in his chair and kept his expression blank as he satisfied himself that every piece of confidential information had spent the night safely tucked into the bed beside him.

"Or someone with a similar agenda," Arthur continued. "Come on, I already said that I’m not looking to shut down your team."

"There’s some commonality of personnel," Eames admitted carefully. "But since I’m hardly working under a formal contract, I couldn’t tell you who’s writing the cheques."

Arthur frowned over his coffee. "Not government, though. You’re sure about that?"

The job had come to him via an old school friend, who shared Eames’s view that governments ought to do their own dirty work and leave the criminal underground to its creative endeavours.

"Quite sure."

"All right."

Arthur took a seat at the opposite side of the table and accepted a half-slice of buttered toast when Eames pushed it over. 

"Come on board with me," Arthur said when it was all devoured. "My brief was to get the algorithm. No-one said I had to stop anyone else getting their hands on it as well."

He licked his fingers, swiped a drop of jam off the plate and continued. 

"There’s at least four teams at work on WishFix, judging by who’s turned down my offers over the last few weeks. And from the questions my CIA handler won’t answer, I’m certain one of them’s being run out of the NSA." Eames didn’t need the pause to get a chill in his spine. The NSA was the perfect illustration of that old saying about absolute power. "It’s the best thing for Renke if we get in there tomorrow, do a good, clean, professional job, and put the information in the hands of government. The NSA hate anyone who’s got better data than they do. If they get to him first, they’ll treat his sub-conscious like an open cut mine site."

Eames scratched his jaw, turning that surprising angle over in his mind. 

"You haven’t mentioned a forgery. You don’t need me on the job. Why are you so keen to have my people get the algorithm?"

"It leaves a level playing field," said the world’s most unlikely bleeding-heart liberal, swiping a clump of mascara from the corner of his eye. "You can smirk all you want, Eames. It happens to be true. Information needs to be free."

"Okay then," Eames said as he piled the breakfast dishes up and put them in the sink. "Where’s the rendez-vous?"

"I’ll sedate him in the limo on the way to the Versace launch. We’ll pick you up once he’s out. I’ll text you the location."

Eames picked up the phone at the side of the counter.

"What are you doing?" Arthur asked sharply.

"Ordering another serve of breakfast. You look like you’re wasting away."

"Egg white omelette," Arthur said with a distinct lack of relish. "No carbs until the job’s done." He glanced ruefully at the empty toast plate. "I’ll pay for that in my training session at ten. It was worth it, though."

From the last day’s curious research, Eames recalled an interview where Zarthur had baldly described the secret of his skyrocketing success as "One part ambition, two parts cocaine". It hadn’t occurred to him that this might be the limit of the miserly luxuries Arthur allowed himself. 

Arthur posted a few more Twitter updates, polished off his omelette, and was already putting in a call to his team when the door closed behind him.

**

Arthur’s team turned out to be the sort that made him reluctant to close his eyes for a second, let alone stick a needle full of anaesthetic in his arm. 

The limo driver with the tightly buttoned livery had the kind of deadened eyes that only years of moral compromises could produce. The architect who slipped into the car with Eames was as neatly pressed as Arthur on his most dictatorial days, hair in an unforgiving tight bun. Even the six-foot stunner in the orange jumpsuit had a steely focus that belonged only on assassins and corporate litigators, and more defined biceps than her cover as a model would account for. The tranq syringe sat on the leather seat beside her. Draped unconscious against Arthur's side, Renke looked to be sleeping peacefully, like he hadn't seen it coming. 

"This is Eames," Arthur said, keeping it business-like. "He’ll take care of the forge on the second level. Let’s get going."

In today's sober [outfit](http://shiroi-ten.livejournal.com/25590.html), Arthur looked like himself as he doled out the lines and slid the needle into Renke’s arm. His waistcoat and trousers were a vivid blue, shading down to a hint of violet at the tie and in the side panels of his boots. With the white shirt underneath, crisp as new paper, it looked decisive, daring and meticulously put together. As the release switch went down, Eames put his doubts to rest.

As it happened, the extraction went off without a hitch. 

It was when Arthur was folding his quick-fire transcription of the algorithm in half and slipping it into his pocket that they heard the threatening squeal of tyres.

"Split up," Arthur ordered, shouldering open the door. "Randall, Catelyn you’ve got Renke. Tell him I got a text about a shoe sale – and whatever you do, don’t let them get a needle in him. Nita, I hope you can move in those wedges because you’re running a diversion. Eames, with me. Go!"

Three cars, Eames saw with dismay as Arthur pulled himself up the wire gate of the construction site they’d pulled up next to and flipped over the top. Three cars full of armed, besuited pursuit. One of them followed the limo as it raced away. The second tore after Nita’s orange form, sprinting into the twilight. The third was—fuck! A bullet clipped the gatepost by his hand as he dropped into the site and set off at a run. Avoiding the exposed gantry, Arthur was running across the grid of steel reinforcement that sat there waiting for the slab pour, nimbly placing his feet like a deadly game of hopscotch wherever he could find a hole. 

"Bet you wish you’d had the bacon and sausages now," Eames said on the other side, as he hauled a bar of unused scaffolding struts up against the two-storey brick wall to serve as a makeshift ladder. Without replying, Arthur darted up the strut, the pointed toes of his boots finding miraculous gaps in the framework. 

Eames was halfway up behind him when he heard the sort of voice that had the authority of precision firearms behind it.

"National Security. Stop or I’ll shoot."

With a longing look at the mere two metres of metal that separated him from escape, Eames froze. But as he watched, Arthur, silhouetted dramatically against the streetlight behind him, whipped out a pistol from some unthinkable recess in his close fitting suit and fired, three times. There was shouting behind him as the pursuit scattered to safety.

Eames scrambled up the remaining stretch of scaffolding, launched himself over the wall and dropped. Arthur landed softly beside him. 

"I’d say I’m doing all right on the omelette," Arthur replied, with a flash of a smile that practically had a wink in it. 

They were in a service lane that ran behind a long block of high-rise. All of them looked equally unwelcoming to Eames, but he could see Arthur examining them rapidly, turning them inside out with an architect’s eye.

"This way."

A few seconds later, Arthur was shooting out a basement window and swinging down into the narrow corridor below. They raced past locked storage rooms towards the lift shaft, footsteps echoing in the empty space. Arthur veered around to slam down a short flights of stairs and stop at a locked door.

"Get ready to bust it down," Arthur said, extracting a thin plastic tube from his inside breast pocket and flicking it open to reveal a top-of-the-range lock pick. "In case this fails."

It didn’t. A moment later, they were inside the fluorescent light of the plant room, just as the footsteps of the pursuit sounded on the floor above. 

"What are we doing here?"

Arthur eased the door closed behind them. "The first luxury skyscrapers had a chilled brine tank in the sub-- Fuck."

He was glaring at a thick iron plate set across the centre of the basement floor, that had two gas boilers and a barrel full of metal girders set on top of it. 

"Okay. There was a system. Chilled brine in the sub-basement connected to broad risers for ventilation. There."

Arthur tested his weight on the nearest boiler’s piping and hauled himself onto it.

"These kind of ventilation shafts had died out by the fifties," he continued absent-mindedly as he fished a pendant out from the buttoned-up neck of his shirt and used the sharp end of it to loosen the screws on the grille on the ceiling. "Took up too much floor space, waste of lettable area. So the poor office workers had to make do with shitty natural ventilation until the seven--"

From outside, an ominous voice carried. "You – check the stairs. You – down there. Rick, go back through those storage rooms. Shoot anything that moves. If he gets the jump on you, you’re a dead man." 

"Get up here," Arthur ordered in a whisper.

By time Eames had climbed up onto the boiler, the grille was hanging down at an angle, leaving a gap big enough to slip through.

"Brace yourself and climb," Arthur told him. "Quick as you can. Jacket off, you’ll need the friction."

A vertical ventilation shaft ran up into the innards of the building. Its distant heights, probably twelve storeys up, were lost in gloom. Between the squeaky rubber soles of his shoes and the grip of his elbows, he was able to shove himself up and hold himself in place.

He shuddered at the sound of a gunshot. Someone shoved the plant room door roughly, but miraculously it held. Arthur was unbuckling his slim belt – he jerked it through its loops, threaded it around one square of the grille and fastened it. He seemed to hold his breath as he sprang up and caught himself against the edges of the vertical shaft: hands out in front of him, one foot latching onto an almost invisible piece of joinery and his back heel bracing him tenuously against the opposite side. 

Another shot produced a swish of metal scraping metal, then an alarming ricochet. Arthur bent down for the loop of his belt, tugged up the grille to seal the bottom of their hiding place, and passed the loop to Eames, catching himself just in time as he started to slip. A second later, there were footsteps in the room below. Soft, unhurried footsteps, belonging to someone who knew his job and meant to let nothing escape him.

In the faint chequered light through the grille, he watched a bead of sweat gather on Arthur’s forehead and roll down into his eyebrow. His face was lined with strain, even as the impeccably pressed suit maintained its precise cut, tight over his bent knee and behind his shoulder blades, but draped everywhere else at a perfect tension that would have made his tailor weep tears of satisfaction.

Slowly, inevitably, Eames’s shirt started to slip against the metal.

Below them, the NSA agent was circling round behind the boilers, his pistol locking onto every new angle that opened up as he moved. Arthur’s eyes were closed now, his fingers thin and white as they struggled to maintain his desperate grip on the vertical surface. 

There was the sound of footsteps retreating, and then the door closed. 

They both stayed where they were, straining their ears for any hint of a threat. 

"Are you carrying?" Arthur breathed. 

Eames shook his head. 

"Wait here then."

Reaching for the loop of his belt, Arthur lowered the grille and slid awkwardly down onto the boiler. He crouched, steadied himself with one hand, and dropped down onto the floor, then disappeared at a purposeful jog.

By the time Eames’s fatigued muscles had navigated him down to floor level, Arthur was back. 

"Coast is clear," he said. "Come on."

There was a bright flicker of blood on the cuff of his right shirt sleeve, the length and width of a matchstick. Eames was fairly certain it hadn’t been there before. 

They climbed back out the window into the laneway and ran.

**

By the time the taxi dropped them off opposite the chandelier-spangled luxury of the Versace launch, a phone call had established that the entire team was intact, and Renke’s brain unscrambled. 

As Eames was fishing out a couple of bills for the driver, Arthur took a sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket, folded it flat over his thigh, and snapped a photo with his phone. He handed the original to Eames. To the untrained eye, it looked like random coding broken up by complex equations. 

Eames folded it back into its orderly, crisp quarters and slipped it away.

"That’s the end of that then," Arthur said. He reached for the door handle but didn’t pull it.

The ceiling light caught both the strip of silver liner along the top of Arthur’s eyelid, and the tight, strained flesh under his eyes. There were two livid lines on the side of his neck, parallel, that Eames hadn’t noticed before. The blood splatter on his cuff had been smudged away, with the application of bottled water and a salt sachet, into little more than a shadow. He could be coming from a slightly tense rehearsal run, rather than a life and death chase.

They were keeping a thousand fashion tragics waiting, across the road. 

The priceless piece of paper in Eames’s pocket crackled softly as he leaned back.

"Not quite," he said.

Actually, the paper in his pocket could be the most deviously cruel trick of their professional history. But tonight, Eames was inclined to gamble. 

"I’ve never got it on with a bonafide celebrity before," he observed, keeping the leer turned down low. "I wonder if you’d care to step out of those expertly cut trousers, after the show, and pretend I'm a groupie."

Slowly, Arthur opened the door and swung open his legs to plant one foot on the sidewalk. The way it made the fabric across his thighs shift and cling to the shapely flesh beneath felt like a fully clothed striptease. Eames was too tired to stop himself staring. 

"I have a report to write." 

Eames longingly watched the neat lines of his waist and sides as he stood up. Somewhere that slim-fit tailoring concealed a pistol, a lock-pick, a phone, and god only knew what else.

Arthur added, "And so for that matter do you." He leaned back into the cab to say softly. "If you waste the opportunity I’ve given you, I really will put you on crutches for a month."

Eames rolled the window down so he could keep on watching those million-dollar legs as Zarthur ascended the hotel steps, disappearing into a blaze of camera flashes and eager fans.

**

Eames’s report was about two lines long. The attachment to it contained everything his employers needed to know. He gave it a month before the internet was swarming with programs to trick, block or evade the vampire-suck of private information that the WishFix algorithm was capable of producing, in benign hands or oppressive ones.

He went back to Mr Kyriou and closed down the false WishFix account, but not before ordering a couple of bottles of Armagnac that he thought might be a welcome surprise to the solitary solicitor. 

When he flicked on the telly, even CNN was buzzing with the news of the sudden and unexpected retirement of uber-model Zarthur, announced barely moments ago in the wash-up of the season’s biggest launch. Rehab, said a spokeswoman who Eames recognised as Catelyn in a pair of silver-rimmed glasses. The pressure of celebrity life had sent him into another meltdown. No, Zarthur had no comment on the rumours that both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were involved. And absolutely no comment on the theory that he was slipping off for a sly bit of facial resculpting. "Zarthur," said the spokeswoman haughtily, "does not believe that the future of the fashion industry should be dictated by plastic surgeons."

He watched slow-mo retrospectives of Arthur’s angular, glittering alter-ego strutting down the world’s most prestigious catwalks. Each clip captured a part of a journey – a journey without an end, without a purpose, apart from the spectacle, the tribute to physical beauty.

He flicked channels for an hour before he got sick of the repeated loops of the few snatches of footage on the public record. Then he threw down the remote and made himself go to bed. 

**

A restless hour later, he sent off a text message on impulse.

 _I’m ordering pizza. Extra cheese. Garlic bread on the side._

He was drifting off to sleep when his phone buzzed.

_OK. 25 mins._

It took him most of that time to find a place that did all-night delivery, and get room service to bring him up an ice bucket containing the most ostentatious bottle of champagne on their menu. 

At twenty-four and a half minutes, with the glasses fizzing quietly on the counter above the bar fridge, the knock came. 

"Congratulations on your—"

The sentence froze in Eames’s mouth. Arthur was standing in the hotel corridor wearing _that_ suit. The black lace that demolished the boundary between masculine and feminine and bewitched Eames’s senses more completely than anything he could remember. The boots that threatened to stride this jaw-dropping outfit onto the pavements of Wall Street, or right up the side of a mountain. Arthur shrugged off the meagre modesty of the opaque black jacket and folded it over his arm as he stepped into the room.

"You heard the news already? Too bad. Low-key would have been an advantage at this stage."

He draped the jacket over the back of the sofa, unhurried. He made no observations about the unmistakable lack of pizza. Watching him from behind as he crossed over towards the champagne glasses, Eames’s palms tingled with anticipation. 

"Are you expecting somebody else?" Arthur asked, glancing at the door, which Eames promptly remembered to close.

He was leaning on the counter next to the ice bucket, keeping his hands free. He did not seem to mind the way Eames’s attention kept swooping down, giving due appreciation to the lovingly close fit of the elasticated lace, the liberal glimpses of nakedness between its delicate swirls, every frank bulge and dip of it. 

"I picked up their last bottle," Eames said as he moved forward, resorting to facts in an effort to settle his imagination down. "Grande Cuvee 2004. It must have been—"

Arthur planted himself in Eames’s path, one hand over the logo of the t-shirt he’d been sleeping in. 

"Thanks," he said, with an ironic hint of reprimand. "For the gesture. The champagne."

Arthur’s hand was still sitting over his breastbone, heat from his fingertips starting to seep through. And everything became clear.

"You don’t give a fuck about the champagne."

"No."

"You’ve been living on champagne and caviar for the last two months."

"Yes."

"There’s beer in the fridge. Shall I—"

For the first time, Arthur’s steady gaze wavered, and his lips parted like he had found himself suddenly parched. "Later," he replied firmly. "How about we leave the beer for later."

Eames ran his hands from the bare skin of Arthur’s elbows up over the lace sleeves. The fabric was pliant with elastic, none of the stand-offish stiffness of the antique version. The texture of it tickled his palms as he passed. It was like a second skin: every intimate shift of muscle came right through it. He hooked one thumb under Arthur’s chin to tilt it out of the way. Then he let four days of longing sweep over him, and he bent down and kissed Arthur’s shoulder through the lace. 

The muscle was firm under his mouth, very nearly unyielding. But the lace whispered its promise of vulnerability. He opened his mouth a little more, tried a lazy graze of teeth. He kept it gentle, kissing Arthur with the reverence of gruelling anticipation. Silently, Arthur shifted under the caress, tension slipping out of him breath by breath. His fingertips found the back of Eames’s neck, traced side to side over the span of it, trailed down to slip under the neck of his t-shirt, kneading hard. 

"A man like Zarthur would have been up to his neck in propositions," Eames mused between kisses as the lace turned damp and he shifted over the dip of the joint and onto the supple curve of Arthur’s shoulder. "Right?" 

Arthur made an unenthusiastic sound deep in his throat. "Sure," he said in a grittier voice than Eames was used to hearing on him. "Not generally my sort of offer though."

Abandoning the lace, Eames moved inward in search of bare flesh. Arthur’s exhale shuddered a little when he nudged up, his nose sliding over Arthur’s jugular, up to the line of his jaw. There was a faint, enticing hint of cologne. His skin was recently shaved with a dangerously fresh razor. He smelled like a man who had gone to a great deal of trouble to make himself ready for sex. He worked his way backwards to whisper in Arthur's ear that extremely vivid fantasy of Arthur with his thighs wrapped around him.

"It’s interesting—" Arthur lost his place for a moment when Eames sucked at the hinge of his jaw, then regathered himself. "It’s interesting how you’ve imagined a whole personality based on the fact that my job required me to walk around half naked. I don’t get off on being shoved around."

Eames found that spot again, kissed it lavishly. "Are you saying no?"

Arthur paused. "I’m saying it would take a lot of persuasion to make that happen." When Eames murmured vague and ardent promises into his neck, he added sternly. "A lot more than you have time for tonight."

He slid to his knees so he could plant fiery kisses over Arthur’s stomach and chest, shoved the lace up out of the way to taste all that beautifully tended skin.

"Wait—" Arthur said, with abrupt irritation, making a half-hearted attempt to pull away. "Wait. Eames. Did you send your report?" He caught Eames’s jaw in his hand and tilted it up to look him in the eye. "Did you send off the algorithm?"

"As we speak, your stolen information is being circulated along the very shadiest channels of the deep web." He turned his head to bite the meat of Arthur’s palm lightly. "I guarantee it. Now are we done with the shop talk?"

When Arthur’s thumb trailed over his bottom lip and eased into his mouth by way of answer, he latched onto it, sucking powerfully. Arthur’s eyes lost their focus and his lips fell open. 

The tiny embedded zip over Arthur’s hip had been invented to break the sanity of a man in Eames's condition. When he finally jerked it down, the fine tension of the outfit’s figure-hugging grip melted away. He grasped Arthur’s naked hips. 

"No hands," he heard Arthur’s voice distantly. "Show me what you can do with your mouth."

Eames did, without shame or hesitation, while Arthur directed him with a pornographically explicit stream of instructions. Kiss me there. Suck. Swallow down. Wait. The unabashed precision of it set Eames's mind on fire. He had never been so deeply aroused from giving head in his life. 

Afterwards, face down on the bed in a stupor of utter satiation, he gradually became aware of voices. 

"Sure," Arthur was saying in a conciliatory tone that suggested he was trying to avoid trouble at all costs. Wrapped in a plush hotel robe, he was reading aloud as he wrote on a piece of napkin. "Hey Arnold, nice delivery, man. Zarthur."

He buried his face back in the pillow and fell asleep to the sound of Arthur demolishing his first pizza in three months. They were almost as wild as the sounds Eames had worked out of him a few minutes earlier. Almost, but not quite. 

**

 _If there's one thing worse than waking up to an empty bed,_ he texted the following morning, _it's an empty pizza box._

It was two full weeks before he received a reply. 

**

The flat was in the old Jewish quarter, a pocket of pre-war apartment buildings that sat just west of Capitoline Hill. A hatch of dusty alleys and courtyards with no thoroughfares to tempt the tourists. 

As he paused to scratch the head of a cat peeking tentatively out of a laneway, he came back to that old question. When he stripped away the fantasy, what would be left? Arthur was a whole other person without the lace and the fur and the uber-model attitude. A person – Eames cast his mind over their professional career, and all the assumptions that Arthur's waxed and glitter-spangled model personal had dispelled – a person he barely knew. 

On the other hand, he knew how many times he'd woken up feverish in the night with the sound of Arthur's husky-voiced instructions in his head, so vivid he could almost taste him. 

The building had no number. He knew it was the right one because on the ground floor was a bakery that sold pizza by the centimetre. After a few minutes drinking in its aromas and fending off the psychotically affectionate cat, he bought an assortment of salami and olive, zucchini and ricotta, and a tart looking margherita.

Arthur answered the door in a t-shirt and track pants, looking unappreciative of Eames's early arrival. For a second, it was impossible to reconcile this dressed-down Arthur, with his hair pillow mussed and running shoes on his feet, here on the fourth storey in a corner of Rome where the catwalks of high fashion would never reach.

"What?" Arthur scowled, defensive. "Have you lost something?" 

Eames thought about how much work, by Arthur's own pronouncement, he had to do.

He started by holding out the pizza. "There's another Grand Cuvee in my bag. I thought you might be missing it."

When he laid down the bag and drew Arthur against him, he felt less ethereal than last time, more solid. The sharpest edges were padded out. 

One of Arthur's hands settled flat over his chest, unapologetically feeling him up.

"Goodness, Mr Eames. You or the pizza. I hardly know where to start."

Arthur's eyes, he realised with a shock, were distractingly warm with all the glitter and kohl washed off him. Lit up by a smile, they were melting away every doubt Eames had ever held.

"Start wherever you like, darling. I know exactly where we're going to end up."

They were still kissing when he heard the swift patter of cat paws darting into the apartment.

**


End file.
